This Halloween will be the first year that Barack Obama won’t be taking his daughters trick-or-treating.

During Ryan Seacrest’s KIIS-FM radio show on Friday morning, Obama said,

When I go out, it becomes a big scene.  Last year, I wore a rubber mask so people didn’t know who I was, and we were able to have a great time.

Obama also talked to Ryan about election day, saying,

On Tuesday, I’ll vote first thing in the morning, then take the girls to school and then we’ll fly to a state fairly close to home that is a battle ground state.

I’ll do some campaigning and hand shaking and all that good stuff.

As for an election day tradition, Obama will play basketball….A tradition he started in Iowa.  “Hopefully I won’t break my nose for the big night, get an elbow in the teeth,” Joked Obama.

In sifting through my review archive I was surprised when my list of the best horror movies of the 90s past the 20 mark. Not necessarily pleasantly surprised, because it’s always hard to cut good movies out of top 10 lists, but don’t be discouraged by all the I Know What You Did Last Summer’s and the like, it turns out that the 90’s were a great time for horror movies. Time to start stocking up for the weekend!

10. Audition (1999), R, 115 mins.

I know, I know. No foreign horror films in either of my Top 10 Horror lists from the 70’s or 80’s, and now here I am squeezing one in at #10. But don’t worry, they make an appearance in the 00’s list, too, so stay tuned for that next week. For now, he’s a characteristically disturbing Japanese horror film about a man who holds auditions for a non-existent film, in hopes of selecting a potential bride for his son.

Instead, he becomes enamored himself with a beautiful young woman named Aoyama who is, shall we say, not exactly as sweet as she looks.

The movie is beautifully photographed but also genuinely horrifying. Like any good horror film, there are plenty of scenes that will have you squirming in your seat (and have your date burying her face in your chest, and that’s important, too), but it also explores the intricacies of an older man dating a much younger woman.

This is a taboo topic in many cultures, and Audition understands that and it uses that tense subject as a foundation for a horror construction that goes far, far beyond the discomfort stage.

It avoids, for the most part, being overtly gory, opting instead for the audience’s imagination when we see something as simple as a single needle, which can be far scarier even than a chainsaw when it’s presented in the right threatening way. The movie is incredibly atmospheric and adds the uncanny quality of a deadly threat coming from a beautiful young woman. This is intelligent horror at its best…

9. Cemetery Man (1994), R, 105 mins.

Tagline - “Zombies, guns, and sex, OH MY!”

How can you go wrong with a tagline like that? It’s like a recipe for a classy horror movie! Who would have thought that Rupert Everett could be so good in a scary movie?

He plays a man named Francesco Dellamorte, the guardian of the cemetery of Buffalora, a small town in northern Italy. He falls for a stunningly beautiful but mysterious woman, played by Anna Falchi, and after breaking the cardinal rule of horror movies by having sex, they unleash a horde of zombies onto the cemetery (beginning with her dead husband), which Dellamorte must then destroy.

The movie is unusually stylish and atmospheric, and stands out even among the classics of Italian horror. It juxtaposes two of life’s most universal realities, love and death (the Italian title is Dellamorte Dellamore - dellamore means “of love,” and dellamorte means “of death”), and manages to pass as a god horror comedy while still being bloody enough to satisfy the gore hounds. Fans of the great Bruce Campbell are sure to enjoy it!

8. In The Mouth of Madness (1994), R, 95 mins.

Regardless of your opinion of the movie, In The Mouth of Madness definitely deserves credit for having one of the coolest titles in horror movie history. Sam Neill plays John Trent, a freelance insurance investigator who has been assigned to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a hugely successful horror novelist named Sutter Cane.

His investigation sends him searching for the charming little town of Hobb’s End which, were he able to look it up on Google Earth on his iPhone, he might find difficult to locate on the map. It seems that Sutter Cane was particularly good at bringing his creative worlds into reality to the point where his novels regularly caused disorientation, memory loss, and paranoia in his readers. John’s problems begin with the fact that Cane’s disappearance took place just before the release of his latest book, “Horror in Hobb’s End.”

John, being a natural skeptic, smells a publicity stunt, sets off to find the supposedly fictional town of Hobb’s End. Fully expecting not to find it, he’s stunned when he stumbles across it so suddenly that he literally almost crashes into it, and then he has to find out how far Cane has gone in unleashing an evil force upon the town’s unsuspencting population…

7. Jacob’s Ladder (1990), R, 115 mins.

Tim Robbins stars as Jacob Singer, a New York postal worker whose life is beginning to fall apart. He is trying to keep his second marriage together but is being increasingly plagued by flashbacks to his first marriage, his son, who died in an accident that Jacob feels responsible for, and his tour of duty in Vietnam.

He begins to feel more and more that someone is out to get him, and as his feelings of a military conspiracy against him get stronger, the line between delusion and reality gets weaker.

The movie makes brilliant use of the visions of demons in everyday life, an intensely creepy technique that has been borrowed in everything from The Devil’s Advocate to The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which itself is one of the scariest movies that I’ve ever seen.

The curious title comes from the suggestions that Jacob seems to be standing in the midpoint of a ladder that reaches up to Heaven and down to Hell, and the story is a journey through his mind, which is infested with a kind of schizophrenic paranoia, as he moves toward the decision of climbing up or down. It’s a bit abrasive at some points, but it’s a hell of a ride.

6. Scream (1996), R, 111 mins.

It’s hard to argue that Scream is anything but a Hollywood teen horror movie, given that it was so successful with high school kids (like me) at the time it was released, it’s populated with Hollywood actors and, for a brief time, it ran the risk of becoming an endless horror franchise, but it does give us a genuine throwback to the classic slasher films of the 80’s, and most importantly, there is a true love of scary movies that permeates the film that I think  makes true lovers of scary movies sit up and take note.

Neve Campbell plays Sidney Prescott, whose mother was brutally killed in her small town. One year later, two students turn up dead at her school and she suspects that their murders are related to her mother’s. The story focuses on the investigations o the murders (both by the police, led by bumbling detective David Arquette, and by the press, represented by the ambitious reporter played by Courtney Cox).

It is the relationships between the characters that make the movie watchable, because David Arquette is so cute that it’s hard not to get involved in his interest in Sidney, while Courtney Cox plays such a heartless and self-serving jerk that we get very involved in Sidney’s fight to prevent her from making a career out of her mother’s and these new students’ killings.

The movie opens with a brilliant scene that shocked us with what happened right down to who it happened to and when, and Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard also give outstanding performances. As a horror film, Scream is not ambitious in covering new ground, but it’s an exhilarating walk over ground that has been ignored for far too long.

5. Misery (1990), R, 107 mins.

In a huge literary stretch, Stephen King gives us a frightening story about a novelist who is so successful that when his car breaks down, the first person that shows up to help is a fan who is so obsessed with his work that she thinks it better to kidnap him and force him to write a novel just for her than to take him to the hospital. Nice!

It’s interesting that King can write such a high percentage of his novels around successful novelists, because I would think that the vast majority of his readers are not successful novelists and so might find it difficult to relate. But he can do it because he focuses on the things in life that we can relate to, like, for example, being caught in the captivity of a psychotic Kathy Bates.

This is the performance that I always remember when I see Kathy Bates, who is a tremendously talented actor. When I see James Caan, on the other hand, I always think of The Way of the Gun.

I read the book when I was about 12 years old and then saw the movie, so the “hobbling” scene and the sheriff at the top of the stairs absolutely affected me for life. They are two of the small handful of horror movie scenes that I saw coming because I had read the books (along with little Gage getting killed and the Achilles tendon scenes in Pet Sematary and the car accident at the beginning of Children of the Corn).

If nothing else, if you watch this alone or with someone else, chances are you’re going to have fingernail marks somewhere on your body by the time it’s over. See this one!

4. Dead Alive (1992), R, 97 mins.

Okay gore-hounds, this one’s for you. Before Peter Jackson became world famous for directing one of the biggest and most successful trilogies ever made, he used to make blood-soaked horror movies the likes of which you wouldn’t have ever thought would lead to a career in mainstream film.

Despite being quite literally one of the single goriest splatter films that I’ve ever seen, the movie keeps a certain charm because it is threaded with a morbid humor and a level of extremism that made the Evil Dead films so much fun. It’s hard not to have a good time with a movie like this when it keeps giving us hilarious bits of dialogue like, “Your mother ate my dog!”

You see, a young man seems to have found his soul-mate, but unfortunately his overbearing mother is not only living with them, but has also been recently bitten by a “rat-monkey” which has turned her into a powerful, blood-thirsty zombie. There is a zombie battle in the movie that, in the world of zombie movies, is truly a spectacle to behold!

Obviously, zombie movies are not for everyone, but for pure zombie fun (and yes, there is such a thing), you can hardly do better than Dead Alive.

3. The Sixth Sense (1999), PG-13, 107 mins.

It’s easy to forget what a great film The Sixth Sense is when director M. Night Shyamalan keeps releasing movies that seem to be getting progressively less and less interesting. He had directed two films before this one, but it was The Sixth Sense that broke him into mainstream filmmaking and earned him a reputation for delivering a startling twist at the end of his films.

9-year-old Cole Sear has been suffering from terrible delusions where he can see dead people walking around in everyday life, a condition that is crippling him with fear on a daily basis. An insecure psychologist, Malcom Crowe, is desperate to help him to rid his head of these visions, in order to help the boy and also to make himself feel like a competent psychologist after past failures.

Haley Joel Osment steals the show with his incredible performance, but even with a powerful actor like Bruce Willis giving one of the most genuinely impressive performances of his career, it is the sheer momentum of the story that propels the movie. Even after numerous viewings, the movie is so good that once you start watching it, it’s nearly impossible to turn it off.

2. The Blair Witch Project (1999), R, 86 mins.

Love it or hate it, The Blair Witch Project is one of the most successful small horror films ever made. The marketing strategy was brilliant, as the approach of the film was shrouded in mystery and headed by one of the most interesting premises that I’ve ever seen for a scary movie.

Three students filmmakers disappeared in the woods while making a documentary about the “Blair Witch,” a local urban legend in Burkittsville, Maryland. A year later, their footage was found in the woods, giving a frigtening and bizarre answer to the mystery surrounding their disappearance.

The movie starts out as just a casual home video, with lots of goofing around and non-acting, and then as they begin their investigation they discover that there certainly is a lot of strange things about the Blair Witch legend.

The movie makes brilliant use of psychological horror, playing with our imaginations using more sound effects than video and allowing us to impose our own fears onto whatever it is lurking in the woods, terrorizing them at night and leaving strange signs for them by day.

The ending is vague enough to have disappointed many people, but like much of the rest of the film, it is left open to individual interpretation and sent people home feverisly discussing what happened and planning to watch it again to try to find out. If nothing else, the necessity for repeat viewings shows that there is much more going on here than in your typical horror film.

1. Army of Darkness (1992), R, 81 mins.

Ok, this is going to be a little bit of a personal choice. Many people will argue that the second Evil Dead sequel doesn’t merit a spot at #1 on a list of the best horror movies made in the 1990’s, but the movie is so well-written and so well-acted and so much fun, that for sheer entertainment, it tops the list for me.

It begins with Ash working in a small market called S-Mart, while something as simple as the curl of hair hanging over his forehead gives him a Clark-Kent-like appearance, making him seem like a giant of life crammed into a crummy job. This guy is destined to be doing something bigger than announcing special sales over the store’s intercom, things like battling the forces of evil in the distant past!

Soon Ash and his car are transported back to ancient times where monstrous forces are terrorizing a medieval castle. By now, Ash is full of confidence, having done so much battle with the forces of evil before (and also because he happens to have brought with him a rifle from the Sporting Goods section), making his character all the more fun to watch.

Unfortunately, he mispronounces the critical words from the Necronomicon, unleashing an army of heavily armed skeletons with whom he does hilarious battle. Like it’s predecessors, the movie is wildly over-the-top, going for every extreme imaginable, but one of the extremes that it achieves is pure horror enetertainment. It’s a modern classic!

Strangely, it’s in my list of the 10 best horror films that I can’t resist adding on an Honorable Mention list for the movies that should be here but there just aren’t enough numbers between one and ten, so here they are in no particular order -

It (1990)

Ringu (1998)

Needful Things (1993)

Cube (1997)

From Dusk ‘Til Dawn (1996)

Candyman (1992)

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Seven (1995)

The People Under the Stairs (1991)

Event Horizon (1997)

Tremors (1990)

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)

Okay, this one’s gonna be harder. It’s odd that the decade that gave us the goofiest horror movies is also overflowing with some of the best, but that’s just the way it is so I’ve done my best to narrow it down to the top 15. Besides, with Halloween just around the corner it’s time to get in the holiday spirit, and what better way to do that than by watching a lot of teenagers get slashed to death by a lot of masked maniacs?

When most people think of October, they most often think of Halloween and scary movies (especially when they’re looking at a big picture of a jack-o-lantern, like you are). So, in an effort to promote one of my favorite genres at one of the few times of the year that it gets the recognition it deserves, here is my list of 15 of the best scary movies of the 1980s…

You know, we just don't get cool movie posters like this anymore!

15. The Stuff (1985), R, 93 mins.

Ok, so I’ll start with one you’ve never heard of again. The Stuff, first of all, is not a great horror movie. Not by a long shot. It’s a thinly veiled social commentary about drug addiction (with a strong undertone about corporate corruption), which doesn’t strike me as the most interesting premise in the world for a horror movie, but ironically you can hardly do better for good, campy fun.

It’s about this creamy new snack product that has become a phenomenal commercial success, almost as though people were addicted to it! It’s difficult to describe exactly what it is, but let’s just say that throughout the movie I couldn’t stop thinking about Marshmallow Creme. I don’t know how Marshmallow Creme could become a success as a snack that people would eat by itself in large quantities, but whatever the case, people can’t seem to get enough of “The Stuff.”

A guy named Mo Rutherford (”They call me that ’cause when people give me money, I always want mo’.”) is sent by a competing corporation to discover what exactly is in “The Stuff” so they can get an edge on the market (apparently this is before the days of Nutrition Facts and ingredient labels). Complicating matters is that The Stuff literally seeped up out of the earth, was discovered and tasted by miners, and then was packaged and sold because it tasted so good.

Unfortunately, it also took over the minds of those who ate it, turning them into zombies and starting a full scale war between humans and this mysterious goo. Here’s a little quote to give you an idea of how this particular war on terror is handled:

Col. Malcolm Grommett Spears: “We’re Americans - we’ve never lost a war!”
Jason: “What about ‘Nam, sir?”
Col. Malcolm Grommett Spears: “‘Nam? We lost that war at home, sonny.”

That leap from snack to zombie is a doozie, but nevertheless, The Stuff is undeniably a horror comedy classic.

14. Cujo (1983), 91 mins.

Donna Trenton is a regular New England wife and mother whose life has been thrown into turmoil after her husband Vic has discovered that she has been having an affair. Brett Cambers is a young local boy whose only companion is a massive Saint Bernard named Cujo (which, incidentally, is an ancient Indian word meaning “unstoppable force”). One day while Vic is away on business, Donna drives her Pinto with her 5-year-old son Tad over to Brett’s father’s car shop, only to have to car break down and the Cambers family is nowhere in sight. But Cujo is around, and he’s pissed off and very, very sick…

Cujo is not a traditional horror movie, it doesn’t do what you would expect with that premise and turn Cujo into a vicious, fire-breathing movie monster. It’s a realistic, suspenseful movie that takes a while to build up, but once it does it never lets you relax and the tension is high throughout. It fits a frightening occurrence into an everyday situation, which was one of Hitchcock’s favorite techniques, and it stars Dee Wallace, who you might remember as the mother from E.T. the year before.

Note: Ten years later, one of the best horror movies of the 90’s, The Dark Half, was released (also made from a Stephen King novel), and it’s main character is a novelist named Thad (pronounced “Tad”). Coincidence?

13. Fright Night (1985), R, 106 mins.

Young Charlie Brewster is a horror movie fan and when two men move in next door and begin behaving strangely he has no doubt in his mind that it is because they are a vampire and his undead guardian. Carlie enlists the only help he can find in hunting them down, a washed-up actor named Peter Vincent who also hosts Charlie’s favorite TV show, “Fright Night.” Unfortunately, Vincent believes in money more than he believes in vampires, so Charlie may be even more on his own than he thinks.

Fright Night stands out among vampire films because of its classic portrayal of a modernized vampire, its villainous nature presented perfectly by Chris Sarandon juxtaposed with the pathetic mortals that he preys on. The feeling of power that this situation gives the vampire is what creates the tension and suspense when one young mortal rises up against him.

The movie was released in competition with films like Nightmare on Elm Street and Back to the Future, but still manages to hold its own with surprisingly impressive special effects and performances that are far better than are now to be expected from 80’s horror movies. Fright Night is not one of the greatest horror films ever, but it is one of the greatest vampire films.

12. They Live (1988), R, 93 mins.

In the same spirit as The Stuff, They Live is one of the funniest scary movies that I have seen. Or one of the scariest funny movies that I’ve seen. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which genre it’s supposed to be. A unemployed construction worker named Nada (played by “Rowdy” Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of sunglasses that allows him to see the true form of some aliens that have infested our population, taken human form and embarked on a campaign to control people’s minds.

Billboards and advertisements, seen through the glasses, reveal their true meanings with slogans like “Obey,” “Conform,” “Stay Asleep,” and “Submit to Authority.” And the aliens themselves are revealed in their true form as well, which is pretty creepy (look to your right and you’ll get an idea of what they look like!).

Nada’s mission is to find the other people that know about what’s happening (the ones who made the sunglasses), sabotage the aliens’ plans and awaken the world to what’s really going on. Along the way he meets a black man named Frank (a brilliant horror comedy performance by the now hugely successful actor Keith David), engages in what might be one of the funniest fist fights ever filmed, and then teams up with him.

The question is - will they be able to make people realize what’s happening, and what will happen when the sleep is washed from their eyes?

Welcome to the real world…

11. Friday the 13th (1980), R, 95 mins.

One of the most famous horror movies ever made, if not necessarily the best, the original Friday the 13th is one of a very small handful of films that gave birth to what became known as the slasher sub-genre, about vicious, relentless masked killers that couldn’t be stopped and seemed to especially dislike promiscuous teenagers.

A group of young counselors at the infamous Camp Crystal Lake begin to prepare to open the camp for the summer, years after a young boy drowned in the lake and, the following summer, two camp counselors were mysteriously murdered. It very soon becomes clear that there is someone who is not at all happy that the camp is reopening, and it soon becomes the scene of a lot of hilarious 1980’s teenage partying and more grisly murders.

Besides being a slasher classic, the movie has become a trivia piece as to who the real killer is. Here’s a hint, it’s not the local nutcase that warned the teens against going up to the lake…

10. Pet Sematary (1989), R, 103 mins.

The Creed family has just moved into their dream house in the peaceful countryside, fulfilling their idyllic location except for the narrow highway on which huge semi-trucks roar past at high speeds and the mysterious cemetery in the woods nearby. The locals are initially reluctant to talk about the cemetery, until the Creeds suffer the tragic death of their beloved cat, Church.

It seems that the cemetery is a mysterious ancient site with the power to bring loved ones back from the dead. They bury Church there and are astonished when he reappears at their house. He’s alive and well but is somehow changed. He’s mean now.

Not long afterwards, the family’s son is killed by a passing semi-truck, and the family, unable to handle their grief, buries him in the cemetery as well. They are at first overcome with relief when he reappears alive and well not long after, but he is also not quite the same…

Pet Sematary is also not a classic horror film, but it has a great story and has more than a few moments that are genuinely scary. This is the kind of horror that I wish Stephen King would go back to, and it has some moments that are some of the more memorable in the genre. An astonishing performance from 3-year old (!!) Miko Hughes (you mey remember him as the little kid in the 1998 Bruce Willis film Mercury Rising) gives the horror in Pet Sematary a particularly, ah, sharp edge (pun intended). See this one!

9. Hellraiser (1987), R, 94 mins.

Taking place in an entirely different horror world from any of the other 80’s horror movies on this list, writer/director Clive Barker’s Hellraiser introduces the world to Pinhead,  who might be the single most recognizable face in horror movie history. Clive Barker not only has the perfect name for a horror novelist (and now, director), but also a truly uniqe and bizarre imagination.

A man and wife move into an old house and discover a hideous monster living upstairs that turns out to be the man’s half-brother (as well as his wife’s former lover). By solving Pandora’s Box and opening a doorway to Hell, he has lost his physical body to the Cenobites (led by Pinhead), but a drop of blood on the old wooden floor of the room upstairs has brought him back into existence.

He soon coerces Julia, his former mistress (a frightening performance by Clare Higgins) to bring him human sacrifices so that he can come back to life completely, with the Cenobites fighting their efforts all along the way.

Hellraiser is Clive Barker’s feature film directing debut, but when Stephen King says, at the height of his own career, “I have seen the future of horror, and it’s name is Clive Barker,” you know you have something special. Also unique about the Hellraiser series is that, of it’s numerous sequels, they tend to be far better than the majority of installments in your typical horror franchise (hear that, Freddy?).

8. The Evil Dead (1981), R, 85 mins.

Fans of the Evil Dead series are often amazed to look back at the original film and compare it to the two sequels (especially Army of Darkness), because when you watch Army of Darkness, it’s hard to believe that in the original film Ash was just such a geek.

Five friends go into the deep woods for a nice weekend out of the city, only to quickly discover an old, rotting cabin in which lies the Necronomicon (The Book of the Dead), and a taped translation of the text from a man who was studying it years earlier in the same cabin. The mystery surrounding his fate becomes more and more important as the group discovers a powerful evil force lurking in the woods around them.

The recitation of the text awakens the evil forces and one-by-one the group makes frightening transformations into demonic zombies, with the (eventually) heroic Ash stunned to find himself battling the evil manifestation in the most bizarre ways imaginable.

Note: The incantation that they recite from the book of the dead - “klaatu barada nikto” - is taken from the classic 1951 science fiction/horror film The Day the Earth Stood Still (”Your choice is simple: join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration.”). A re-make of the film, starring Keanu Reeves, is set for release this December.

7. The Lost Boys (1987), R, 97 mins.

To this day it’s difficult for me to watch Kiefer Sutherland in any film or tv show without thinking about this movie. You just can’t go wrong with a tagline like “Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire.”

A single mother moves to a small coastal town in California with her two sons, and right away the town is plagued with bikers and mysterious deaths. The younger boy makes friends with two other boys who claim to be vampire hunters, while the older boy becomes interested in a beautiful girl who lures him into the biker gang.

As the older brother’s sleeping habits make a sudden and suspicious change, the younger brother becomes more and more deeply involved in the obsession of the vampire hunters and begins to suspect that his brother has become one. He sets off on a mission to find and destroy the lead vampire and therefore save his brother’s soul.

Besides being one of the most entertaining vampire films around, The Lost Boys stands out as a great popcorn flick. The entertainment value is high and the performances throughout are impressive, and it even has a great soundtrack. The Lost Boys was far ahead of its time…

6. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), R, 90 mins.

Here’s a curious little factoid about the original Nightmare, besides being the film debut of Johnny Depp, it is midway through this film that we learn that Freddy Krueger, who is now one of the most morbidly loved horror characters ever, was a child molester who was released on a technicality. The reason he’s dead and haunting the dreams of teenagers is because he’s seeking revenge on the private citizens who took the law into their own hands and killed him!

In the movie, he returns from the dead to haunt the dreams of the children of the people who killed him. The line between dreamland and reality is blurred as Freddy begins killing off victims in their sleep, resulting in their deaths in real life, leaving one girl with the mission to draw him out of her dreams into the real world so that he can be killed once and for all, without being killed herself in the process.

It was a long, long time ago that this movie stopped being scary, but it’s got a clever premise for weaving nightmares into real life, made by a director on his way to the top of his game. The entertainment level is high even if the scares have long since evaporated, but if nothing else, who could forget that girl in her underwear rolling around the walls and ceiling of her room??

5. Poltergeist (1982), PG, 114 mins.

Steven Spielberg makes another unexpected appearance in another top 10 of horror list with his 1982 film Poltergeist, which must be the most successful family horror film ever made. I always forget that the movie was rated PG, which tends to make me think that it can’t be much of a horror movie, but it remains one of the most genuinely entertaining and fun ghost story movies I’ve ever seen.

A family is visited by ghosts in their home, which at first seem to be friendly, moving objects around the house to the family’s amusement, but soon their tricks turn mean and nasty. The family’s young daughter seems to have found a way to communicate with the ghosts through the static on the tv, but soon she is “kidnapped” into an unknown parallel world.

A memorable perfomance by Zelda Rubinstein as the curious Tangina, the woman who comes to clear the home of the ghostly spirits and save the daughter, makes the movie particularly memorable, along with several impossible to forget scenes, such as the living trees and the coffins popping out of the swimming pool. Excellent entertainment, even for the weak of heart.

4. Re-Animator (1985), R, 86 mins.

When I think about Re-Animator, the first thing that pops into my mind is that, if nothing else, it is a campy horror classic that deserves to be called a horror camp classic. It gives us the kind of horror/comedy that makes the Evil Dead films so much fun, and it remains a great film despite the fact that the soundtrack seems to be a naked rip-off of Bernard Herrman’s score for Psycho, probably the single most famous sound ever to have come from a movie.

Jeffrey Combs delivers a wonderfully crazy performance as Herbert West, the mad scientist who believes he has discovered a scientific way to beat death, and he becomes desperate to try it out on a human being rather than small animals, on whom he has had remarkable success. In order to carry out his experiments, he needs to get his hands on some fresh corpses, and in the horror genre, this premise makes for a great movie.

The movie is all about too much gore and too much blood and too much gratuitous nudity, but also about too much fun. It’s so over-the-top that it’s hard notto have a great time with it. It’s a great example of how much fun horror movies can be.

3. An American Werewolf in London (1981), R, 92 mins.

Two American students on a walking tour of England  are attacked one night by a werewolf. One is killed while the other escapes but is badly injured. The werewolf is killed but reverts to its human form, so the local people deny that it ever existed.

The surviving American begins having nightmares about hunting as a wolf, and the original werewolf’s recent victims begin appearing to him ad demanding that he find a way to die because as long as he is alive they are trapped between worlds because of their unnatural deaths.

The mutilated victims appearing to him and brainstorming about how he can kill himself provide for some pretty classic horror comedy, but it is the remarkable and groundbreaking special effects used to show the transformation from human to werewolf and back that really made the movie stand out when it was first released. In fact, the creativity and ingenuity displayed in the technical production of the film remains respected and admired to this day.

2. The Evil Dead II (1987), R, 85 mins.

Why is The Evil Dead II ranked #2 while the original film is way back there at #8? Well, mostly because it is one of the rarest kinds of movies in the film world, a horror sequel that’s better than the original. In fact, it’s almost more a remake of the original film than a sequel, which is probably part of the reason that it’s better than part 1.

Once again Ash is in the woods in the old, broken down cabin and listening to recorded passages from the Book of the Dead. Soon the forces of evil are unleashed again and the night becomes a long, grisly, enormously bloodly but side-splittingly hilarious chainsaw/shotgun battle between Ash and the fiendish horde of demons.

An innumerable quantity of classic quotable quotes and Bruce Campbell’s phenomenal performance (it may very well be the funniest performance in a horror movie ever filmed) make this one of the bloodiest but most highly entertaining horror movies around. I can’t begin to tell you how many drinking game opportunities are to be found here!

1. The Shining (1980), R, 146 mins.

Okay, so technically 1980 is the 70’s (right? because we count from 1-10, not from 0-9), but The Shining was directed by Stanley Kubrick, one of the cinema’s greatest directors, written by Stephen King, the most successful horror novelist of all time, and stars Jack Nicholson. How can you go wrong?

You probably can, but they didn’t. The Shining is one of the two or three scariest movies that I’ve ever seen, and I have this movie to thank for a fear of hallways that I developed the first time I saw it and that continues to this day. Thanks a lot!

Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson - once again playing a character with his own name) is a writer who needs some peace and quiet to work on his next project, so he and he signs up to be the caretaker of the cavernous Overlook Hotel during the winter, when heavy snowfall cuts it off entirely from the rest of the world. The hotel owners are required by law to inform them that the last caretaker went crazy and brutally murdered his family while overseeing the hotel in a previous winter, but Jack is not bothered.

He and his wife and son go up to the hotel and begin to spend a quiet winter there, getting accustomed to the massive amount of space and empty hours, until Danny begins to have strange visions with a ghostly presence in the hotel, in particular the errie appearance of what have to be the creepiest twin girls ever. He has a “gift” that the hotel’s cook explains to him is called “shining,” which allows him to see the grisly images of the terrible things that have happened in the hotel in the past.

Soon Jack begins to lose touch with his sanity, having visions himself of people and things that may or may not really be there, and ultimately the true nature of his own existence becomes questionable.

Kubrick’s unique directing style and his love of tracking shots gives a unique experience for the sheer size and emptiness of the hotel, but Jack Nicholson’s performance as the increasingly unstable Jack Torrance and his terrorization of his own wife and son is the centerpiece in what is undoubtedly one of the most thoroughly well-made horror movies ever made.

For some reason, I really get a kick out of the HAHAHAHAH at the bottom. I've seen all five movies, so surely someone somewhere is laughing at me!

So the tagline for Saw V is “You won’t believe how it ends.” Yeah, whatever. More like, “you won’t believe that it ends.” And you shouldn’t believe it, either. The grisly series has been a dead horse for three movies by now, but if the rumors circulating the internet are true, there will be at least two more.

In the movie’s defense, there are times when the premise is interesting and creative, at least more than I had anticipated. Eyes will glaze over throughout the audience when the movie starts out with Jigsaw saying Hello so-and-so I want to play a game, but the story that the movie tells is a lot more ambitious than you might think. It’s better than part 3 and 4, but that’s not saying a lot.

The vicious, brutal death-traps remain the centerpiece of the movie, but this one gets extra points because it goes behind the scenes into Jigsaw’s world. The problem is that the movie tries to tell a bigger story than the material can sustain. There is a series of flashbacks that jumps back and forth between past and present (and more than one previous Saw sequel), making the movie convoluted and confusing. You may find yourself wondering why Jigsaw is masked and kidnapping people one moment, and lying in a hospital bed struggling for breath the next.

The Jigsaw Killer - feeling much better than in previous movies...

There are three main stories going on in the movie. Five apparent strangers are forced to perform violent tests in order to get a door to open before it locks forever, and during each test, one person will be, ah, voted off the island. The whole scenario is remarkably similar to Cube, a far more interesting movie.

The other story is a detective named Mark Hoffman who is involved with Jigsaw as sort of an unwilling accomplice, and then there is an Agent Strahm that is investigating the killings from outside Jigsaw’s world, trying to figure out what’s going on while the five strangers are killed off one by one.

By this point in the series, hardcore Saw fans (which I am guessing make up about 90% of the remaining audience) will probably be mostly interested in the new torture devices, but the movie spends a huge amount of it’s relative short running time jumping around in flashbacks and side stories, including one about Jigsaw’s daughter, who has inherited a mysterious box, the contents of which Jigsaw explains are “of grave importance.”

Agent Strahm, early in the film, escapes a trap that was not meant to test him but to kill him, and he begins to suspect a copycat killer or that Jigsaw had an accomplice. Hoffman has a unique involvement in Jigsaw’s killings, and is forced to try to cover his tracks while at the same time overseeing the deadly game involving the five supposed strangers, while they themselves try to get to know each other enough to figure out why they were put there together in the first place.

As before, Jigsaw once again is taking on the laughable mission of trying to clean up where America’s shoddy legal system screws up. The movie opens with a stomach-turning scene involving a guy who slipped through the cracks, serving only five years of a 25-year sentence because of a technicality. I appreciate the effort of the movie trying to make a comment of the shortcomings of the American legal system, but it’s pretty hard to take it seriously when it tries to present the Jigsaw Killer as doing the Lord’s good work. He’s like a Boondock Saint with a violent imagination and a lot more time on his hands.

Detective Hoffman tries to remember what happened when he saw this on "CSI: Las Vegas."

The performances are passable, given the movie that they’re in (which doesn’t really ask much of an actor except screaming), although there are a few moments of remarkably awful acting. Tobin Bell once again lends his creepy voice to a nice synthesizer and then to that creepy doll, but the look of the movie is pretty thoroughly boring. It’s totally lightless from beginning to end, a cheap horror technique that gets real old real quick.

Not much effort is put into having a good twist at the end of the movie, although the closing scene does have the element of surprise and, like mostly all of the movies before it, is pretty painful to watch. This is not the worst Saw film that they have sprung on us so far, but there is definitely nothing in it to make me look forward to any more sequels.

Captain Kirk showing his good side...

1.    Halloween is the Celtic New Year. It was originally a pagan holiday to honor the dead (note: “pagan” means “heathen!” - See #19). It took place, as it does now, on October 31st, and was called All Hallow’s Eve (the next day, November 1st, was called All Saint’s Day). It dates back more than 2000 years.

2.    Due to the movie’s tiny budget, for the Michael Meyers mask in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) the prop department had to use the cheapest thing they could find, which turned out to be a spray-painted William Shatner mask.

3.    Made on a budget of $320,000 in about three weeks, Halloween became the highest grossing independent film ever made at the time of its release (it grossed more than $65,000,000).

4.    The Mexican version of Halloween Day is called Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), and takes place on the 1st and 2nd of November. They use the occasion to to gather together with family and friends and pray for loved ones who have died. They believe that during the Dia de los Muertos, it is easier for the souls of the dead to visit the living.

5.    The “Jack-O-Lantern,” according to Celtic folklore, got it’s name from a guy named Stingy Jack, a miserable old drunk who liked to play tricks on everyone from his own mother to the Devil himself (see the full story at the end of this post).

6.    You must hold your breath while walking past a cemetery or you might breathe in the spirit of someone who has recently died. And if I’ve learned anything from years of watching scary movies, there is no way that can be a good thing.

7.    Jack-O-Lanterns originated in Ireland, where people would put candles into hollowed out turnips and beets to keep away evil spirits and ghosts on the Samhain holiday. Why did they use turnips and beets and not pumpkins like normal people? See the story about Stingy Jack below.

John Carpenter - "Nobody breaks up with ME and gets away with it without being terrorized in a series of wildly successful horror movies!"

8.    To the original European immigrants who first brought it to North America, Halloween was a celebration of the end of the summer harvest, and they would observe the holiday by gathering around a bonfire to tell ghost stories, sing, dance, and tell fortunes.

9.    Laurie Strode, the beleaguered heroine of the Halloween movies, was named after John Carpenter’s first girlfriend.

10.    Halloween is the second most commercially successful holiday (Halloween candy sales average more than $2,000,000,000 [$2 billion] annually). Christmas, of course, is number 1.

11.     Tootsie rolls were the first wrapped penny candy in America. They were introduced in 1896 by an Austrian candy maker named Leo Hirschfield, who opened a tiny candy shop in New York City. He named the candy after his 5-year-old daughter’s nickname, “Tootsie.”

If #13 wasn't true, this whole series would never have happened!

12.    The ancient Celts believed that spirits and ghosts roamed the countryside on Halloween night, so they began wearing costumes and masks to avoid being recognized as human!

13.    Horror movies, love them or hate them, show us the most unusual and creative human deaths that any of us will ever see (and I’m willing to bet that includes real life CSI’s).

14.    Pumpkins also appear in nature in white, blue, and green.

15.    It is believed that the Irish started the tradition of trick-or-treating. In preparation for All Hallow’s Eve, Irish townspeople would visit people throughout their neighborhoods asking for contributions of food for a town feast.

Trick-or-treating has benefited everyone from lost 9th century souls to this kid's dentist!

16.    Another theory is that trick-or-treating originated with a 9th century European custom called “souling.” Christians would go from village to village on November 2nd (All Souls Day) and beg for “soul cakes,” which were square pieces of bread with currants. The more they received, the more prayers they would promise to say for the souls of the donors’ lost loved ones. At that time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for some time after death, and prayer, even from strangers, could quicken a soul’s passage to heaven.

17.    The music in Halloween was credited in the movie to the “Bowling Green Symphony Orchestra,” but was actually put together by John Carpenter and a few of his music buddies. It is one of the most famous and enduring horror movie scores of all time.

18.    About 21% of pet owners dress up their pets for Halloween. No word on what their marriages are like…

Say your prayers, Peter Pan, I'll kill you with cuteness!

19.    There is some debate, with opinions generally divided, as to whether or not Halloween is a Satanic holiday. What do you think?

20.    In North America, it’s bad luck if a black cat crosses your path but good luck if a white cat crosses your path. In Britain and Ireland, it’s the opposite.

21.    Black and orange are the colors of Halloween because orange represents the Fall colors and black represents darkness and death.

22.    Superstition says that if a bat flies around a house three times, it is considered a death omen. So if you live in bat country, keep a BB gun handy.

23.    It’s bad luck to allow a fire to burn out on Halloween.

24.    The significance of black cats is that they are believed to be the protectors of a witch’s powers. If a black cat walks toward you, it brings good fortune. But if it walks away, it takes the good luck with it.  Again, keep that BB gun handy.

Hey man, I don't make up the rules, I'm just reporting this stuff. Who would have thought you could make a witch look sexy??

25.   Every year almost without exception, the most popular Halloween costume for women is something that starts with the word “sexy.”

26.    Also almost without exception, men who dress up for Halloween in a costume that begins with the word “sexy” do not look at all sexy.

27.    Halloween did not become an American holiday until the 19th century because the restrictions of lingering Puritan tradition prevented even the observance of Christmas before the 1800s.

28.    Check this out - It was the transatlantic migration of millions of Irish immigrants following the great Irish Potato Famine (1845-1849) that finally brought Halloween to America. So basically, we have an overseas potato shortage to thank for our second most commercially successful holiday!

29.    Halloween was mostly a social holiday from the 1800s until around 1910, when the introduction of postcards first commercialized it. Masks and costumes were not being mass-produced until the 1930s, and trick-or-treating didn’t become a permanent holiday fixture until about 20 years after that.

30.    Salem, Massachusetts claims to be the “Halloween Capital of the World,” while at the same time trying to disassociate itself with its history of persecuting witches. The irony kills me! Anoka, Minnesota also claims the world title, but sadly has no history of witch trials to make it stand out. For some reason, national attention continues to evade its beloved annual Halloween parade.

31.    Your humble writer would really, really, really like to know where he can get a bottle of Stingy Jack’s authentic pumpkin wine. So, if you know, feel free to help me out!!

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And now…

One dark Halloween night, a deceitful and bitter old drunk named Stingy Jack managed to trick the Devil into climbing up an apple tree. Once he was in the tree, Jack quickly put crosses all around the tree, trapping the Devil. He then told the Devil that he would not let him down until he promised not to take his soul when he died. The Devil gave the promise and Jack finally let him down.

Years later, when Jack finally died, he met Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates of Heaven and was told that he had lived a worthless and miserable life on earth as a drunken trickster, and so would not be allowed into heaven. He was sent to Hell to talk to the Devil, and once there, Jack reminded the Devil of his promise not to take his soul. The Devil kept his promise and didn’t allow Jack to enter Hell.

Now, Jack was scared and had nowhere to go. All he could do was wander forever in the total darkness between Heaven and Hell. He went back to the Devil and asked him how he could survive when there was no light, and the Devil, in an unusual gesture of kindness, responded by tossing him an ember from the flames of Hell to help him light his way.

Jack placed the ember in a hollowed out turnip, one of his favorite foods which he always carried with him, and from that day on, Stingy Jack roamed the earth without a resting place, lighting the way as he went with his lantern…